The X Window System is a large and powerful (some might say
excessively large and overly complex) graphics environment for UNIX
systems. The original X Window System code was developed at MIT; commercial
vendors have since made X the industry standard for UNIX
platforms. Virtually every UNIX workstation in the world runs some variant
of the X Window system.

A freely redistributable port of the MIT X Window System version 11,
release 6 (X11R6) for 80386/80486/Pentium UNIX systems has been developed
by a team of programmers originally headed by David Wexelblat
<dwex@XFree86.org>. The release, known as XFree86, is
available for System V/386, 386BSD, and other x86 UNIX implementations,
including Linux. It includes all of the required binaries, support files,
libraries, and tools.

In this document, we'll give a step-by-step description of how
to install and configure XFree86 for Linux, but you will have to
fill in some of the details yourself by reading the documentation
released with XFree86 itself. (This documentation is discussed below.)
However, using and customizing the X Window System is far beyond the
scope of this document---for this purpose you should obtain one of the
many good books on using the X Window System.

If you have questions or comments about this document, please feel
free to mail Eric S. Raymond, at <esr@thyrsus.com>. I welcome
any suggestions or criticisms. If you find a mistake with this document,
please let me know so I can correct it in the next version. Thanks.

Please do not mail me questions about how to
make your video card and monitor work with X. This HOWTO is intended to be
a rapid, painless guide to normal installation using
the new interactive configurator. If you run into problems, browse the
XFree86
Video Timings HOWTO. (This is the up-to-date HTML version of
XFree86's `Videomodes.doc' file.) That document tells everything I know
about configuration troubleshooting. If it can't help you, I can't
either.